More interesting, to steal from Dr. K, is that this Arabic-influenced scene is how the author/translator chooses to handle Camilla’s death. As Dr. K says, Camilla is a woman warrior. She is powerful, and yet beautiful. For the time, this was impossible to wrap one’s mind around, so the author not only places her in a tomb, distanced by death, but an elaborate, flamboyant structure at that, which is tinged with the exotic, thereby placing Camilla just out of reach. This elaborate description, not only of materials but also the ever-present bow-and-arrow and the destruction of any stairs allowing access to the tomb, sets Camilla apart as a phenomenon more than a person, discouraging any attempt to “understand” the woman warrior by exalting her and doing so through “foreign” practices.

When Dronke goes into the issue of translation, I perk up. In hindsight everything is a phenomenon, and we are able to distance ourselves sufficiently to “study” the past. The warnings that history is doomed to repeat itself if we don’t pay attention the first time around is crap; we’re going to repeat it, it’s just a matter of time before we get cocky enough to think that certain events and practices are simply of the past and that we are now more sophisticated.

Certain tendencies are part of “human nature,” if you’ll excuse the cliché. One of these tendencies is stealing ideas from another group (ahem, culture) due to their exotic appeal, among other things. (I realize I’m being reductionist and that there are a million and one reasons to steal from other cultures, but bear with me.) Another extremely significant tendency is storytelling. Therefore, it is only natural, not to mention inevitable, that one culture should appropriate the stories (among other things) of other groups or cultures, and what’s more that they should alter these ever-so-slightly to make them relevant to their daily life.

Case in point: I made a feeble attempt at translating “The Angel of Death With the Proud King and the Devout Man” for my boyfriend. Not in a grand display of my mastery of Spanish, but as a necessity as he is low on his English. He is a devout Christian, and upon reading this story I thought I have so got to show this to him. The characters involved are Muslim, but the moral is universal… or so I thought. As I was translating, which took much longer than I could ever have imagined, I came upon the first mention of “Allah”. Hmm. While I could have simply translated it to Dios to serve my purposes, I left it at Alá for the sake of staying as close to the “original” as possible. When I later shared my rough translation with my boyfriend, I was quite proud of the time and effort I had put into the small project and I thought for sure that he would fall in love with the story and the moral like I had, maybe tack it up on his wall. I warned him, “It’s from Arabian Nights so they’re using ‘Allah’ but I think it’s pretty universal.” As I finished reading my translation aloud, I looked to my Christian friend for a reaction, fairly proud of myself… whereupon he wrinkled his forehead and said, “There is no God but God; Allah is the devil.”

So it seems that he has some sort of block against even acknowledging elements of another faith. And what if I had simply translated the word “Allah” to “Dios“? And what if I even threw Christ in the story somewhere? I was amused when I realized that I was doing the very same thing that probably goes into these collections of stories in the first place, only I wasn’t quite as smart. While I was asking for an opening of the mind and an acceptance of the ideas of another culture as parallel to our own, it seems that what I should have done in order to get my point across would have been to take the story and change the necessary elements to make it a Christian story. Tah-dah! Then it still means the same thing, but my oh-so-devout boyfriend could accept and appreciate it.

While this feels only slightly disingenuous to a student of English literature accutely aware of the issues in translation, the same has been occuring for centuries. The borrowing of stories is nothing new, and even the stories

Another reason these stories may be linked is the simple fact that when people travel together, they will talk and exchange ideas as well as stories to ease the bordom of the trip.  This is true even in our own culture, only now we use DVD players instead of storytellers.

On to “History of 12-century Philosophy.”  I agree with badspeller about all the name dropping, like he said in class today. (Sorry, can’t think of your name at the moment.)  Anyway, Dronke, seems to like the sound of his own voice, and he says a great deal, using elaborate language, so that he can seem above those of us who must suffer through his writing. 

Dronke has a few interesting points about how the Arab culture has influnced the western way of thinking.  He also has a great deal to say about how the works were translated and how the lingusit at the time did not do a very good job of it.  Of course this is true even today if you have a piece of literature translated from its original language to another, you are always going to loose some meaning simply because the person translating the text will do so in his/her own fashion.

To begin with, I got a mixed message from this text. One moment Dronke is saying how Arab philosophers are essential in the developement of Western Christian thought. Okay, got it, there was respect for the Eastern thought, even though they are still considered infidels and bad to the Westerners during their crusades.

Dronke also uses the word “apologetic” a number of times. Can anyone clarify what he means exactly? I thought that the Crusaders didn’t care about the infidels, and yet they are apologetic to the Arabs.

One of the (what I consider) major parts of the text is the recognition that there were translation issues from Arabic to Latin and so a number of consequences occured that unwittingly shaped the Latin language and skewed the understanding of the Arabic texts. For starters there was a diproportion in the languages with the words meaning being. In Arabic there are many terms that funtion as synonyms for said word and the Latin language had problems with this. Secondly translators who saught accuracy in the translations used Latin words in an unfair, technical sense. Also new, phonetic words were created when translators ran out of options. Finally, the act of tranlating Arabic into latin created new Latin words.

What confuses me is that Dronke says all of this and then sates “The translations from Arabic do not seem to have done much to enlarge the scope of philophical Latin in the Middle Ages” but the theories of Aristotle elaborated by the Arabs entered the Western Christian Philosophy.

So wait, it was Aristotle, not the Arabs, that shaped Christian Philosophy? So was Arabic simply the barrier between the West and ancient Greece?

Pretty much what I got out of this text was that the Arabs had written a lot of Aristotle’s works and then the West took it from them and translated their writings into Latin. Dronke also dabbles in the idea of the East’s influence in Western Science but with all of the back-tracking and name dropping I was pretty much lost. I understand that noetics provided Western thought a new way of thinking and the ideas of morals were incorporated through the work “Disciplina.” Overall the point is made that the Arabs had a significant impact on the West and no one really awknowledge it then so it is not really common knowledge today.

There were a number of strange and unnerving ideas placed forth by Irwin that I have never thought about before. For starters I have never contemplated the origins of stories until today. It shouldn’t be surprising that the original story, THE story, cannot be traced back to any particular, original idea. This reminds me very much of what T.S. Elliot would say about poetry and the lack of creativity a writer has to offer. It’s eye-opening to realize that the Arabs and Egyptians were the possibly some of the first to bring out stories that would later be picked up by the Europeans who would call them their own. Irwin’s attempt to connect all of these cultures got confusing since his explanations seemed to hop all over the historic timeline and cultural boundaries.

I knew that it is difficult to be able to trace many stories due to the fact that they were passed on orally across generations and cultures. But the racism and sexism of the time is incredibly frustrating, not because of the obvious inequalities its produces for those in the past but rather the skewed historical records and difficulties of understanding where a story originated from. But better yet is the fact that Arabian Nights was not considered literature due to its vulgarity yet the Europeans embraced such imagery and continued to look down at the Arabian lifestyle. And fiction in general was considered a low-status type of writing.

In my ignorance, I didn’t see the purpose of story-telling going beyond simple entertainment. But according to Irwin these stories were also ways to teach young princes morals and provide beggars with a means of earning some extra coins.

While nations were divided by war and power struggles it is amazing to think that there were still deep-rooted ties between the countries. On cannot escape the influence of other cultures, no matter how hard one tries.

It is amazing to hear about the resilience of these stories. We simply read them in our youth or watch them on the television with absolutely no idea on how they had come to be. The Middle East had a great impact on the European story and in turn
America’s concept of a story. It’s funny to think that much of their credit was taken away, not just because of the racism but also due to
Arabia’s dislike for stories. There was no fad for stories in the Middle East so
Europe embraced it and took most of the credit.

So wrote this yesterday but this stupid site decided not to publish it. here is my second attempt…